Pistachio sorbet, lemon sorbet with a shot of vodka, lavender, rosemary, fig sorbet....flavors have gotten wild and yummy! Last week's Desperation Dinners featured an easy to make Fig Sorbet that you can make at home:

Late last summer the California Fresh Fig Growers Association set me three flats of fresh figs to enjoy, photograph and use to develop recipes. If you’re been a reader of this column or our Kitchen Scoop blog, you know I adore figs. My grandmother had a row of fig bushes that were the size of trees in her backyard and my brother and I would sit for hours under them, eating our fill of fresh figs through the summer months.
California figs start producing in May and some varieties go all the way to December. According to the Fresh Fig Grower’s website:

• Fresh Brown Turkey Figs are available mid-May through December.
They are a light purple to black-skinned fig with pink flesh and a robust flavor.
• Fresh Black Mission Figs are available mid-May through November.
They are a purple to black-skinned fig with pink flesh and an intense earthy flavor.
• Fresh Kadota Figs are available June to October.
They have a creamy amber color when ripe with a light delicate flavor.
• Fresh Calimyrna Figs are available July through September.
They are large, pale yellow-skinned figs with a nutty, sweet flavor.

About halfway through my fig stash, I worked on fig sorbets. While fig is probably not the number one flavor you’d pick for sorbet, every variety of fig produced a unique, delicious sorbet. It’s almost as if figs were meant to be sorbet! Each sorbet uses the same process no matter which fig variety you find in your area.